On Ecstasy Poem by Alexander Long
I like hearing things before I feel them and the other way The disconnect I guess Listening the scent
around the shadow
of Hendrix
The symphony of an oyster sluicing down the throat The hum of horseradish in its wake And ounce after ounce of Grey Goose erupting In the guts like a rainbow The scent of a rainbow is dampened wood In August and August sounds like crickets and frogs Fucking their brains out and sex tastes Like oysters the sea Looks like laundry on the line Just before a summer downpour Giddy
helpless
everywhere
I prefer the Walt Whitman to the Brooklyn To leap from but it makes no difference I’ve just crushed a mosquito against my ear again And its one-note song tastes Of iron I’ve been told dust is my destiny Hurry up
I say
I couldn’t be happier
Alexander Long's third book of poems, Still Life, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2011. He's also published four chapbooks, the most recent being The Widening Spell, an abridged biography of Amerian poet Larry Levis, edited by Jess Smith (Q Avenue Press, 2016). Work appears & is forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Blackbird, Callaloo, The Chronicle of Higher Education, From the Fishouse, Iron Horse Review, New Letters, Plume, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, & Writers' Chronicle, among others. Long is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, the City University of New York.
14 PS_Winter_2018.indd 14
12/3/17 6:51 PM
